The Myriad Millennium

By Benjamin Burress

Paul is an android created for a singular purpose: to find and kill the enemy of his maker. In a wide world containing few clues to the identity of his quarry, and a commander who is missing in action, it is not an easy task.

Alone in the world, covertly pursuing his elusive target wherever his formidable search skills guide him, Paul becomes detective, hunter, fighter, traveler, thinker, and, in time, dreamer--whatever is necessary to navigate the difficult path set before him. But did Paul's creator make a mistake in giving his android a soul along with a purpose? As strongly as he wishes to be free of his inviolable directive to end a life, Paul wants answers to the puzzle of his existence that only his creator--or perhaps his seemingly phantom enemy--can provide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Benjamin Burress
• Release date: Feb 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310076732

Benjamin Burress

My working life has always centered around science and education, but writing fiction--mostly science fiction and fantasy--has been an accompaniment throughout; another mode of expressing thoughts and feelings about the world and universe. As a Peace Corps Volunteer I taught physics and math in Cameroon. I worked for ten years at research observatories, first NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory, and then at Lowell Observatory. Since 1999 I have been a staff astronomer and content researcher at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, California.

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Chapter 1

There was a popping noise. I opened my eyes.

I lay on my back, naked, four feet below a ceiling, the bare underside of the floor above. Its thick joists were undressed, darkened with age and sketched with cobwebs.

Surrounding me on all sides was a crowded and disordered workshop. The air was complex with the smells of an industrious and closed space: solvents, lubricants, sawdust, plastic, a hint of electrical burn. Against my back I felt the pressure of the hard slab on which I lay. I estimated its top surface to be approximately four feet above floor level. Four bright light bulbs set in metal reflector cones glared at me from all sides. A face also glared, its glittering dark eyes fixed on my own, its mouth gaping open as if forgotten.

The face appeared male, middle-aged, and of mixed racial heritage. High cheek bones projected from a wide, hairless face cast in an ashy complexion. Slight epicanthic folds accented the edges of deep brown eyes. Straight brown hair flecked with white stood a centimeter from the scalp. The lips were thin and dark.

The face leered at me. I did nothing.

Thirty-six seconds after I came to consciousness the man spoke.

Paul, he said in a vacuous whisper. Do you understand me?

Yes, I said.

Are you receptive to your first command?

Yes, I said.

I did not instill this directive in you as part of your construction. I must give it to you directly for authentication of its origin.

I understand, I said.

There is a man, he waved his hand toward the dusty basement ceiling, who you must kill.

He paused, as if waiting for me to prompt him.

What is my directive?

He opened his mouth, uttering one sound.

K....

His eyes snapped shut and his head began to vibrate, as if in the grip of a seizure. Through clenched lips he forced out a word.

Kill.... His mouth clamped shut and his body folded, crumpling stiffly to the floor.

I waited, flat on my back on the hard slab, listening to the man as he thrashed around beyond the horizon of my vision.

Kill! he managed to bark.

I did not move. I said nothing. I waited for my directive. I was in a purely receptive state, awaiting the completion of input of my directive. The single word I had been issued was too general, unless I had been created simply to kill. However, I remained in a command-receptive state, so evidently there was more to it than that.

Kill the man! he said loudly. He knocked something over that responded by shattering. Kill the man! It seemed all that he could do to utter those words, and he choked immediately after saying them.

I have received my directive, I said. Please provide a name.

There was no response, and the sounds of struggling on the floor diminished to minor shuffling noises.

I sat up and looked at the man. His body was no longer thrashing. It appeared that his convulsions were so intense that he could barely move at all. He merely vibrated.

Within my memory I found information regarding the first-aid steps for protecting an individual afflicted with such paroxysms. Instead of applying the information, I swung my legs off the palette of granite I had been laying on, shifted my weight to my feet, and stood up on the dusty concrete floor. I walked swiftly to the wooden staircase leading up and out of the basement. I had my directive. All other considerations were secondary.

Emerging into a hallway through a door at the top of the stairs I passed by a mirror mounted on the wall. Without a pause, I glanced at my reflection, recorded the image, and moved on down the hall.

I assessed my physical form as I moved through the house. My outward appearance was that of a human male, and according to information in my memory, the likeness was a good approximation of a real specimen. Everywhere that there should have been a hair follicle I sported a dark hair. In every spot where a sweat pore should have been there was a depression that resembled a pore. My skin was tan, though lighter than that of the man in the basement. My hair was a tangle of medium-length dark brown strands, apparently never combed. The elements of musculature under my skin looked and responded as human muscles, helping give shape to the faux physique. The feathery blue irises and scleral blood vessel patterns of my eyeballs would easily pass casual inspection as real human eyes.

I went upstairs.

The house was a Victorian, and poorly maintained. Dust covered most surfaces, thick and clumpy in corner spaces, with thousands of footprints cutting paths through the hallways and into some of the rooms. Dingy, dust-coated sheets covered most of the house’s furniture, in the halls, the parlor, the dining room, and four bedrooms I entered.

One bedroom on the second floor, and its adjoining bathroom, showed signs of use. A meager collection of relatively clean men’s clothing stocked a wardrobe and dresser in the bedroom, and a few simple toiletries—soap, comb, brush, hand towels and bath towels—were set about the sink and tub in the bathroom.

Another room on the second floor also bore signs of activity. It contained a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet, the former piled with stacks of papers. All the furnishings were relatively dust-free. A foot trail sliced through the dust on the floor, connecting the desk to the main door, with one less-used side trail spurring off to the room’s double window.

If my creator was the occupant of this house then his lifestyle was eccentric—not slovenly, but unconcerned with comfort.

The clothing I found in the upstairs bedroom was in fair shape. I put on the cleanest trousers, shirt, and pair of socks I could find, and then tied on a pair of black shoes. The clothes were a bit loose but the right length, and the shoes were a near fit. I put on a tie, sports jacket, and belt. There was an old gray Fedora hat in decent condition on the wardrobe’s top shelf, so I put it on. I finished with a long gray overcoat.

I needed to appear normal and not draw attention. To fulfill my directive, I would go out into the world and blend in with the crowds. I required anonymity, invisibility.

I left the house and my afflicted commander behind, stepping onto a sloping street in San Francisco, California. The sun was high and clear, though the air temperature fell toward the cooler end of the typical human comfort level. I walked a half block to the corner, and then turned north down the hill. I had no specific destination and chose the direction to lead me toward the highest local traffic area.

A few blocks down I encountered a grassy, tree-shaded park—the Panhandle, according to information that surfaced in my memory.

Picking up a discarded newspaper from the lid of a trashcan, I sat down on a park bench and spread it out, directing my eyes to the open pages. I had scanned and recorded the print and pictures immediately, but did not turn the page for a minute, to appear to be perusing the paper at a normal human pace.

I was not wasting time. As I sat sweeping my eyeballs from line to line, I also monitored radio and television transmissions across the spectrum and eavesdropped on conversations spoken within the range of my hearing.

In the first hour, I learned nothing pertinent to my directive, as I expected. It would have been serendipitous to acquire useful intelligence in this mode. However, reading the paper and monitoring communications was a surface activity. My more productive engagement was the search for information within my own memory. If my creator had built me for a specific purpose, it was reasonable to assume that he would give me all the information he could to help me do it.

I found nothing, not even a name. My directive was clear: kill the individual my creator evidently wanted dead. Why would he not make my task as easy as possible? On a planet of over five billion people and two hundred million square miles, my task would not be simple even if I possessed the subject’s identity.

Perhaps my creator had a reason for not including the information in my memory. He said that he needed to give the directive verbally, for purposes of authentication, but why had he not also included specific information of the subject? He may have planned to provide the particulars after my activation—in which case the best course of action was to return to the house and revive my creator.

My first emotion surfaced: embarrassment. It had taken me an hour to come to this simple conclusion. I was being too efficient, at the expense of common sense. My first line of attack had been to bring all my personal resources to bear on the problem. By filtering the news, by analyzing for content everything I recorded, by attempting to calculate how in the vast world I could find my quarry, the simplest course of action had eluded me. This, I acknowledged, was my first lesson from life experience, and I would not make the same mistake again.

I opened the basement door and descended the creaky wooden steps. The workshop was dark. I stopped halfway down the stairs, scanning the space in selected infrared bands to determine the room’s dimensions, contents, and heat sources. The sweep revealed what I already knew to be there: machining tools, shelves of electronic components, racks of bottled chemicals, laboratory glassware, the central granite-topped table, an old X-ray machine under a plastic dust cover, and shelves upon shelves of storage boxes.

The man was gone. A lack of detectable heat differentials on the floor made it clear that the basement had been empty for at least twenty minutes. A fresh search of the house revealed only one difference from the survey I made before leaving the first time: a handwritten note.

Happy hunting, Paul. Take my advice and learn how to dream.

The circumstantial evidence suggested that my quarry, the subject of my directive, had been here and was aware of my existence. Had the writer of the note come here while I was gone and, finding my creator helpless, disposed of him?

I conducted another survey of every dusty footprint in the house, starting in the basement and working upward, through the first-floor front hall, parlor, dining room, kitchen, pantry closet, and one downstairs bedroom, then onto the second floor’s bedrooms, linen closet, and the room the house’s occupant had used as an office.

Recalling an image of my creator’s shoes from when I viewed him on the basement floor during his convulsions, I made comparisons to the catalog of foot impressions I had compiled from the dusty floors throughout the house, eliminating my own footprints, both bare and shod, from the set.

Other than my own, the only footprints in the house matched the shoes my creator had been wearing, and another pair I found in the bedroom. A more recent set of prints, made after my departure from the house, told a story that began in the basement and moved briskly up the stairs, skipping two steps with every stride, made a left turn into the entry hallway, and then a long-stride dash to the front door. There the subject stopped, turned around, and led me upstairs, into the master bedroom and to the nightstand where I found the note. After this, the alleged author of the message went to the window, paused, and turned to exit the bedroom. The path led back downstairs and out the front door. I lost the trail two meters down the sidewalk, the residual dust laid down by my subject’s shoes diminishing on the relatively clean concrete.

I speculated on the evidence.

Had my creator, coming out of his seizure, planned to leave the house, but first climbed to the second-floor bedroom to write me the note? It was a logical conclusion based on the physical evidence, but with a major flaw: the note. Why would my creator write such a note to me? Why would he then leave? If he was coherent enough to write me a message, why had he not waited to speak with me in person, and to explain whom he wanted me to kill?

Perhaps he had fled upon divining that his foe was near, and there was no time to wait. If so, why waste precious time writing the note, especially since it conveyed so little information?

I turned my attention to a more intensive search of the house. I found papers with names on them: utility bills, cancelled checks, insurance statements, and other documents accumulated over many years of routine household business. Handwriting I found among the stacks of pages was not the same as that of the note, but the name in common to most of the records was Francis Myriad.

The story told by the years of household documents was mildly interesting. A James Myriad bought this house forty-one years earlier, on April 2, 1950. He lived in it until 1975, when Francis Myriad became the deed holder. James Myriad had been wealthy, though the financial records did not reveal the origin of his fortune. Records of Francis Myriad’s current bank accounts and investments claimed that he was worth over ten million dollars.

In the basement was a trove of information concealed beneath a slab of concrete. I located a buried trunk with my sonar after reasoning that a hidden cache should exist somewhere in the house.

The trunk contained a well-organized and extensive set of documents: purchase records, schematic diagrams, reams of chemical equations and tables, diagrams of atomic orbital valence structures, volumes of data on the physical properties of materials, and a comprehensive body of information on the human brain, neural structures and interactions, and brainwave patterns.

A small filing cabinet within the trunk contained a repository of prints of CAT scan cross-sectional images and MRI maps of a human skull and brain. The scans came from the UCSF Medical Center, produced in January 1989 according to labels attached to the bottom corner of each print. The subject had likely been female, according to features of the skull.

The set of head scans in itself was somewhat intriguing, but as I fingered through the prints, I became drawn into a more complicated mystery.

A stack of regular X-ray negatives followed the set of scan prints, marked in neat handwriting only with dates that ranged over an entire year, the most recent being ten months earlier. I recalled the X-ray camera equipment under the plastic dust cover in the lab and assumed that it was the instrument used to produce this series of images.

The subject of the images was the same human brain mapped by the CAT and MRI scans, though after removal from the skull. What captured my attention as I advanced through the X-ray images was a steady and progressive change in contrast between different brain tissues. The cerebral cortex regions grew brighter, while the vascular networks darkened. The X-ray negatives were not detailed enough to reveal exactly what in the cortex was causing greater X-ray absorption, or why the branching blood vessel systems were becoming more transparent.

Toward the end of the stack, the cortex practically vanished into underexposed whiteness, its tissues apparently blocking most of the X-rays. Even the dark vascular channels that had once laced around and across the cortex lobes were beginning to fade, hidden by the increasing opaqueness of the surrounding tissues. The final negative was a mere white silhouette of a brain, lacking all internal anatomical detail.

I made a connection then. The purpose of the entire basement laboratory had been to create me: the carbon fiber bones of my skeleton, my pseudomusculature, my power generator, the sophisticated fiber optic network of my autonomic nervous system, my sensory array—my entire body. The contents of the unearthed trunk suggested that there might be more to my central nervous system than computer circuits and software.

Had my creator used nature’s own design to instill his killer robot with consciousness? One scenario that the materials in the trunk described began with a human brain subjected to a process that gradually changed its composition from organic brain matter to denser substances—inorganic substances, I hypothesized. Housed within my inorganic body a natural human brain would require an extensive life support system. Technical diagrams and specifications for my entire body were stored in my memory and indicated no such brain life-support system. It was doubtful that the de-skulled brain featured in the X-ray images could be alive anyway.

Transfixed by the mystery of what might be the formation of my brain, I forgot for the moment about the directive that my creator had placed upon me, mesmerized by the puzzle of my mind. There were no explicit descriptions of my brain function to consult; my creator had not written a primer. All that I had to work with were technical data in my memory and the contents of the basement laboratory.

Considering all the evidence, I speculated on what my creator had done, and how he had done it. Directive or no directive, the more I knew of my own nature and capabilities, I reasoned, the better I would be able to carry out the will my creator had instilled in me.

I cross-referenced the set of brain imagery in the filing cabinet to the extensive collection of chemical equations, atomic valence data, and lists of physical properties of materials. I assembled an inventory of all equipment and material within the lab, focusing on items likely related to experiments on a human brain.

I envisioned several scenarios for using the lab’s resources to not only embalm, polymerize, or otherwise fossilize the brain tissues, but in a way that would retain the neural structures in an electrically functional state.

Treat the nerves, I speculated, with a solution to deposit a conductive or semi-conductive material on them. Silver, and silicon, if distributed properly in the axon and cell body structures, might be able to form a network of transistor-like nodes. Then, after the deposition in the nerve cells, replace the surrounding brain tissue with an insulating material.

The technical diagrams in my memory revealed nothing about my brain, other than its location in my chest. All the fiber-optic control bundles that splayed through my body converged at an ellipsoidal object nested within my ribcage and extending downward, occupying the space where in a human the left lung and stomach would be located. However, the object was unlabeled and void of detail.

I returned my attention to the basement laboratory. Speculating on the meaning of the trunk’s contents was intriguing, especially considering the possibility that it had something to do with my brain, my mind, but I had reached an impasse: I could learn no more without additional data.

I reburied the trunk, replacing the pieces of concrete I had broken. Considering that the trunk was merely a repository for a set of data and information and contained no secret plans or documentation of extraordinary results, I wondered at the purpose of its interment. Had anyone but myself analyzed its contents it was doubtful they would have interpreted it as I did. It was 1991, and robots of my technical sophistication were not known to exist, let alone any with artificial awareness.

I put this line of speculation on hold and returned to my primary task. I expected that my quarry was now either running away from me or hunting me. If he or she was running, then I had plenty of time to pick up their trail. Otherwise, they would come to me eventually.

I headed downtown. Along the way, I stopped at a gun shop that accepted overpayment of cash as an acceptable form of identification. I converted a portion of a thick wad of cash I found in Francis Myriad’s house into a Glock-17 nine-millimeter pistol and ammunition.

Next, I went to City Hall to research Francis Myriad in more detail. I did not find much information about him—little more than confirmation of the man’s legally registered